


Brains

by Decoder13



Series: The Booty Shorts Chronicles [2]
Category: Battle for London in the Air (Roleplay)
Genre: Booty Shorts Timeline, Crack Treated Seriously, F/M, Immortal Illuminati AU, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Incidental Lizard Content, Pairing Roulette, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 05:09:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29504610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Decoder13/pseuds/Decoder13
Summary: Hinged or unhinged, Dr. Jhandir is a most welcome addition to the EVIL Biomedical Division.
Relationships: Dr. Anil Jhandir/Charlotte Sterling
Series: The Booty Shorts Chronicles [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2181549
Kudos: 3





	Brains

Charlotte stood beside the door, arms crossed, as a couple of the lab assistants rolled the most recent subject out of the room.

“Down the hall and to the left. You know the drill,” she said. Her eyes weren’t even on the assistants or the covered corpse as she spoke, lingering instead on the three-screen setup on her desk. “We’ll finish up analysis and get the report around, and then you can put all those _delightful_ fonts in.”

One of the assistants groaned audibly. Nobody at EVIL liked Director Massey’s insistence on using a custom font and set of styles for official internal communications. They were _internal_ , and no one but the director seemed to care whether they were in Arial or in Hyperthin Future Nouveau San-Serif Bold-500 (or whatever the new font was called; Massey had gone through quite a few).

“Alternatively, clean-up duty,” Dr. Jhandir suggested flatly from across the room, where he sat intently focused on his work and seemingly paying no attention at all. Even now, he radiated an unnerving aura of still paying no attention despite the perfect interjection. It was positively uncanny.

The two assistants exchanged a Look, and Charlotte knew they had them. No one liked clean-up duty when too many things had been taken apart too many times and were under observation in too many different stations. Especially not when the people doing the taking apart had been Doctors Sterling and Jhandir.

Charlotte was never quite sure if Jhandir was _trying_ to scare the lab assistants, or if he was just like that. Both, she suspected. Assistants came and went and were really only worth noting after they’d made it through a few years. There was a certain natural lack of investment or consequence in most of them, maybe due to that. And no one else still managed to strike the fear of god into them quite like Jhandir.

“Fonts are fine,” one of the assistants muttered as he pushed the gurney along just a little faster.

“Remember,” Charlotte added sweetly as they left, “13-point, dark gray, unless you’re volunteering to help with the kidney shortage.”

Once the pair was a little ways down the hall, Charlotte distinctly heard one of them moan, “Graphic design is my _passion_ ,” in a tone of abject despair. It was all she could do to stifle a chuckle. Back across the lab, she swore she heard Jhandir snort, too, just once. It was nice to hear.

She walked back over to her desk and pressed both hands down on it for support as she leaned in towards the screens. There were some differences in the examination data this time, at least. But not enough, not here, and this set of analysis was done. Maybe elsewhere? She’d look later, make something of it then. Charlotte flicked her laptop shut with a sharp snap and watched all the other monitors go dark.

“Kill the whole setup with the brain,” she said quietly. The examination had been informative but frustrating. This was a wall they kept hitting again and again: revivification only worked so many times on a single human body before it became impossible. Yes, five chances at eternity were better than just one, but this immortality wouldn’t be the immortality she sought until death could be addressed by an infinitely reliable solution. “It has to be done with the first process by now. Kill the scanner. Waste of data storage at this point. We can look over what we have here in a few hours.”

She had to keep reminding herself that every new iteration of data kept this work from being a pointless failure, but contrary to popular gossip she’d heard circulating through the labs, she had not had her emotions erased as part of an experimental procedure. She still had the full set. Sometimes that meant that she couldn’t weather every obstacle with the same confident smirk plastered onto her face.

“No,” Jhandir replied. He stared intently at the bastardized scanning contraption the lab had spent three years making to fit their needs, a Frankenstein’s Monster of other equipment and computers that some of the assistants had charmingly nicknamed Janky Jake. The brain was suspended in a tall, clear tube with a clipped semicircle of metal on either side. It pulsed softly and looked for all the world like a 1970s sci-fi prop. “No, I don’t think I will.”

Charlotte looked up from the dark monitors and over to her lab partner. “Still looking for a path through the chaos, Jhandir?”

“Already found one,” he replied.

There it was - the answer she’d been holding out for. That was what she liked to hear. Swapping out Kern for Jhandir was already proving to be her best decision of the last decade, maybe even the last century. Kern was having a grand time cataloguing lizards or whatever it was they did over in Environmental, and Jhandir actually knew how to read the languages of the human machine. It was all Kern could muster to decipher an occasional phrase and tease something out of the context clues. Jhandir was fluent, maybe beyond even her.

Charlotte rolled her chair over to Janky Jake and the man monitoring it, sat down, and grinned.

“Talk out a map for me, then,” she said. “Take me where you’re going, and I’ll see what I can see.”

Jhandir leaned a little closer to the display screen and squinted. “Try to keep up. I haven’t had enough coffee to backtrack and still have any patience left for the living.” He sighed. “Did they do anything with the heart?”

“In the freezer chest,” Charlotte replied. “Not the big one, the one back in the corner. I’m slated to do some work on it tomorrow, and it needs to be whole for that. Do whatever you want afterward. Just fill out all the paperwork.”

“Paperwork. Right.” He paused. “It’s just a heart, I can copy and paste. Tissue samples.”

“More? Are you trying to wallpaper a room with them?”

“Not primarily, but I’m open to new recycling solutions. I wonder how long it’ll take Kern to realize that the interns captured his lizard?”

They simultaneously glanced over to the cabinet where the interns had been keeping the aforementioned contraband lizard. Kern would be furious if he knew it wasn’t some sort of IIA sabotage plot, but really, what could he do about it? Massey didn’t like him half as much as he liked either of them. They’d decided by mutual silence that the contraband lizard was fine. Charlotte had drilled some holes down there to guarantee airflow, and she was 90% sure that Jhadir was behind the recently installed sun lamp. This could continue for quite some time.

Their eyes almost met as they turned their focus back to Janky Jerry and the brain tank. They were about a second off from sharing the devilish spark of a couple of high schoolers in on the same senior prank.

“We should write a ransom note,” Charlotte suggested. “In blood?”

“Or cerebrospinal fluid. Dyed red. He couldn't tell the difference,” Jhandir quipped. “I prefer the brains, but this time the heart seems possibly fascinating.”

This was the other key thing about working with Jhandir: his mind tended to jump around. She had no reason to believe that he was always like that based on reports and footage she had of his behavior prior to his death. The pride and the sarcasm were still there in spades, as was the brilliance to back them up, but there was now a… _wandering_ quality to the way he expressed things and a supernova of a temper lurking beneath what had seemed to be cool, even-tempered professionalism.

The psych evaluator had been disingenuous in calling him “crazy,” though. It was just that any filter or regulator on his brain had seemingly exploded. She couldn’t blame him for that. It had felt so satisfying convincing Massey to abandon his own son to lasting death after that last Incident, especially after reading Beck’s quaint little booty shorts in the photo documentation. Quite a bold claim to wear on his ass as he got himself returned to his god, wasn’t it? It had turned a “maybe” into an emphatic “no”. She was his god, and she let him die. She’d walked around feeling light as a cloud and grinning half-wildly for days after that meeting. Actually killing the man to begin with had surely been even more liberating.

Besides, the _sincerity_ of Jhandir’s madness, for lack of a better term, was entrancing in its way.

Charlotte raised one eyebrow. “Define fascinating.”

“I might be setting part of it on fire,” Jhandir said, finally looking back over his shoulder. “I’m not particularly interested in explaining why until it works.” He paused. “It’s decay. I think the decay is cumulative.”

Charlotte’s eyes lit up. He’d jumped again, but it had only taken a second to follow him back to the brain in the tank and the Revivification Problem. “From each dormant period?” she asked.

“The longer they stay dead, the more the body and the organs begin to decay, and the less viable any attempts to revive become. We’ve addressed some of it, but right here” - he pointed to exactly the right display on the screen beside the scanner without even looking at it, a trick he was getting better at by the week - “The brains are sabotaging us. Other organs are easier to repair, and what needs to be fixed to keep them in working condition is easier to identify, most of the time.”

“What you’re suggesting,” Charlotte said, bringing her folded hands up to her chin and leaning forward, “is that our little problem with revivification limits is smashing us repeatedly up against the limits of current knowledge about what the human brain does and how it does it. We need to find what we've been neglecting in storage and repairs.”

“What I’m suggesting is that brains are lunar rockets held together entirely by duct tape even at the best of times,” Jhandir said. He flicked the tank, as if the shuddering human brain was a fish that he could provoke. His eyes were practically on fire. One hand was clenched in a tight fist, subconsciously threatening the dead man’s neural network to fight him. “Which is to say yes. It’s here. In the brain. There's something there critical to function that's giving out, on average, after five procedures, depending on the time passed between expiration and reactivation. We need to find where it is. Our next steps are all in the brain.”

There was a certain handsomeness to him in moments like these. Of course, he was never unattractive, except maybe in a couple of brief facial hair phases. The intense expression, the keen eyes, the strong brow, the fine, unimpressed line of his lips - Charlotte had noted all of these things increasingly over the time since Jhandir’s rather unique recruitment. And all of that was even more so when he was all alight like this, with a dozen years’ worth of human brains already spread out before him on the operating table of his mind and cracked wide open later, already, someday, now.

Charlotte rose from her chair and went to stand by his side at the scanner. With the general direction of his insights shared, it was easy enough to see what he saw and where he saw it. Would she have still seen it without him? Yes, she was confident that she would have, in time. But she wouldn’t have seen it yet. She had to admit that she wouldn’t have seen it yet.

Jhandir’s eyes followed her path over to him and stayed fixed on her as she began to review the results. “We’re going to need quite a few more brains,” he remarked. She could hear something of the smile in his voice.

“I’m sure we could borrow some from around headquarters,” Charlotte quipped, glancing over to him. She was right. He was smiling, if only a little. “Plenty go unused.”

Jhandir’s eyes suddenly narrowed. “Have you ever killed a man for something other than science?”

Charlotte was taken aback a little, but perhaps not as much as she could have been. Watching the brain today seemed to have set him off down a path she hadn’t seen him in before. He was working through something. “It depends on what particular sciences you’re including under such a wide term.” She paused. “But yes. I have.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Curiosity.”

“That’s akin to science.”

“And because I felt powerless,” she added. “Because right there, at the intersection of life and death, are all the answers, right at the only place you’re untouchable.”

“Right there, you’re god,” he mumbled.

Charlotte blinked and nodded, slowly. She’d never heard someone say it back to her, just like that.

“You’ve definitely killed for not-science,” she said. With anyone else, she’d say it because, if it turned out she’d overstepped, they could take it as a joke. Jhandir would know that it wasn’t. The different thing was she was alright with having no excuse in front of him.

“There’s always a little science in it. Albeit… incidental. Sometimes there’s a pulse running so deep beneath it, the science is incidental.”

Charlotte finally looked away. Maybe she was blushing, but she didn’t want to care about that. “The brain. You were talking about the brain.”

“Right.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jhandir shake his head. In denial? To say no? To clear his thoughts? He pointed to the screen again, precisely and with a quiet desperation. “The ratio of decay. There’s a pattern. Look at the prefrontal-”

“Would you consider talking through this over tea?” Charlotte asked abruptly. “Somewhere other than the lab, maybe?”

She expected a sound “no” from Jhandir. The man was known to sometimes even sleep in the lab, sometimes not 30-feet from a corpse. They’d had pleasant work chats before, warm beverages and intriguing hypotheticals, but always in the context of the lab. She had to expect a sound “no”. But now suddenly felt like the time to ask.

Maybe it was the excitement of the breakthrough, or the especially wild ride his bran was on today, or that sudden white-hot moment of recognition lurking those four words: _right there, you’re god_. He knew that place they’d been waltzing around together, that they’d passed each other in blindly before they’d even properly met. What a thing to say. She wondered if he always would have admitted that. She wondered, from how softly and haltingly he’d said it, if he’d have put that out in the open air for anyone else.

“Tomorrow,” Jhandir replied. “I know a place. At 3. I’ll probably have something to say about the heart, too, by then,” His voice had gotten just a little quieter. Charlotte took a moment to remember that the heart he was talking about was the one in the freezer. Probably. “You understand.”

“I try.”

“I haven’t lost you yet,” he said, returning to scan results. “That’s always refreshing. You’d have figured some of this out whether or not I said anything.”

“ _Most_ of it,” Charlotte amended.

“I haven’t lost you yet,” he repeated. There was something less familiar in his voice now. Surprise? Awe? “We’re at the brink of something. We need to keep with this, whatever it takes.”

Charlotte hummed in agreement. “It would be convenient if someone else died tomorrow.” Maybe it was a joke. She put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s good work, Jhandir.”

She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting when she did that, but she realized only after the fact that it was not for him to reach one hand up to his shoulder and intertwine his fingers with hers. It was a shock, then, when he did, nearly electric. She grasped them tight when she realized she had them, and he didn’t shy away. He held her there as much as she held him.

The ever-scrolling display of the scanner cast a soft blue glow across the both of them. Their faint reflections, hazy and soft over the backlit glass cage of the gently pulsing brain, made them look familiar to the mystery and to each other in a way she’d never consciously considered they might already be. There was a low, steady pounding in her ears that she fancied was someone's heartbeat before remembering that there was a significant lizard walking around under the counter. She felt a slight tremble in Jhandir's shoulder at the same moment, the aftershock as they both held back the same laugh at the _absurdity_ of it all. This felt a hundred degrees more intimate than if he’d just dipped her backwards in the middle of the lab and kissed her.

What a limited, broken, marvelous thing a human brain was.


End file.
